Making money in business is all about making sales, and the sales process consists of finding prospects, attracting them, and closing a sale.
What else can you do?
Find Incremental sales opportunities (ISO’s). And after the initial sale is done, the most profitable next action is to spend time fostering relationships with the client and engaging them so they spend even more money on your business.
Before you can do that, you have to take a step back and prioritise your clients. That’s because not all clients can grow. Unfortunately, many sellers don’t correctly prioritise their clients, and they end up wasting time that should be spent with those that have the largest ISO potential.
The best way to fix that and prioritise your clients is with the Sales Leader Classification System. Here is how it works.
Engagement and Potential
The Sales Leader Classification System divides your clients into four segments based on two criteria: current levels of engagement and potential to grow.
Engagement
How engaged are your clients? A simple way to measure engagement is to look at how many of your employees are working with your client’s employees. Consider engagement like infiltration. If a lot of your team members work with several of the client’s team members, there is a high level of engagement. If your client treats you more like a vendor, doesn’t call often, and isn’t proactive, there is a low level of engagement.
Potential
The next characteristic you will use to analyse is your clients’ potential. Look at each client, and decide if they have a low potential or a high potential to provide more revenue.
You can measure potential with pure revenue or likelihood of expansion. A client with high potential might be one that can spend more money on one service, or it might be one that may be interested in additional services.
Four Client Categories
The next step is to use levels of engagement and amount of potential to divide your clients into four categories. These classifications will tell you how much time to spend with each client to make your business more lucrative. Think of your clients’ level of engagement as the vertical axis and their amount of potential as the horizontal axis on a graph.
Maintenance Accounts
The first classification, Maintenance Accounts, includes clients that have a low potential to grow but have high levels of engagement. These accounts are worth maintaining because the clients are buying a service from you and helping you make more money.
Key Accounts
Key Accounts have high levels of engagement and increasingly high potential. Usually these are clients that are innovative and expanding. They have a high potential to spend more money on your business, and they are already highly engaged, which makes them an excellent source of revenue.
Service Accounts
Clients that treat your business as a vendor and don’t have much room for growth or more engagement are classified as Service Accounts. Generally these accounts don’t expand very much. You should not spend a lot of time or resources trying to develop relationships with them.
Growth Potential Accounts
Finally, there are Growth Potential Accounts. These clients are not buying much of your business now, but there is a lot of potential for increased engagement and more sales. Don’t confuse these with Service Accounts, which don’t have room for growth.
When you use the Sales Leader Classification System correctly you can easily divide your clients into one of four categories. This will help you prioritize your time and increase your sales, making your business more effective and lucrative.
